AMD officially launches A-Series processors for notebooks

Continuing with its Fusion family rollout AMD has now officially launched their A-Series of accelerated processing units -- or APUs. Unlike the low-power flavor of Fusion chips already on the market, the C-Series (Ontario) and E-Series (Zacate) for netbooks and budget laptops, the A-Series (Llano) was designed with desktops and mainstream laptops in mind and will be the first from AMD made using a 32-nanometer manufacturing process.

AMD is taking direct aim at Intel's Core 2011 processors with seven laptop APUs across three families, available as the A4, A6, and A8. The dual-core A4 chips will compete with Core i3 processors, while the quad-core A6 is going after i3 and i5 chips, and the quad-core A8 will take on Intel's range topping i5 and i7. Here's a quick look at their specs:

Model

CPU clock

CPU cores

L2 cache

Radeon GPU

Shaders

GPU clock

TDP

A8-3530MX

1.9GHz/2.6GHz

4

4MB

HD 6620G

400

444MHz

45W

A8-3510MX

1.8GHz/2.5GHz

4

4MB

HD 6620G

400

444MHz

45W

A8-3500M

1.5GHz/2.4GHz

4

4MB

HD 6620G

400

444MHz

35W

A6-3410MX

1.6GHz/2.3GHz

4

4MB

HD 6520G

320

400MHz

45W

A6-3400M

1.4GHz/2.3GHz

4

4MB

HD 6520G

320

400MHz

35W

A4-3310MX

2.1GHz/2.5GHz

2

2MB

HD 6480G

240

444MHz

45W

A4-3300M

1.9GHz/2.5GHz

2

2MB

HD 6480G

240

444MHz

35W

All models support features such as HDMI 1.4a, DisplayPort 1.1, and USB 3.0, as well as multi-monitor setups, 3D gaming and 3D Blu-ray playback. A-Series chips will also offer the option of adding a separate discrete graphics card on top of the bundled GPU, in a setup called AMD Dual Graphics that is said to boost graphics performance by up to 75%. Furthermore, AMD is also touting 10-plus hours of battery life, or 50-60% more than comparable laptops from last year.

In terms of pricing, systems with the A4, A6, and A8 chips are expected to start around $499, $599, and $699, respectively. AMD expects more than 150 laptops and desktops to use A-series parts starting almost immediately. Toshiba has already announced the new Satellite P700, equipped with the AMD A6-3400M, while HP has updated eleven of their Pavilion and ProBook laptop models to include the latest AMD parts.